Mayor Bill de Blasio faced reporters after Tuesday’s jihadist attack on pedestrians along a bike path in lower Manhattan and declared it “a particularly cowardly act of terror.”

But revelations that the jihadist, a 29-year-old Uzbekistan national, came to America at the invitation of the U.S. government in 2010 under a program called the Diversity Visa Lottery, is spawning a chorus of questions.

One stands out from the crowd.

Who is the bigger coward?

Sayfullo Saipov, the Muslim migrant who took advantage of a legal migration channel to come here and kill eight “infidels” in accordance with the dictates of his religion, or the politicians in Washington who invited him to move to the U.S. for the sake of expanding our “diversity” and who now scoff at the idea of ending this visa program?

Sayfullo Saipov entered the U.S. in 2010 at age 21 under the U.S. State Department’s Diversity Visa Lottery program

The diversity visa program was created by Congress in 1990, and since 2005 there have been several attempts to kill it, none of them successful. The latest attempt was in March of this year, but even this Republican-dominated version of Congress cannot seem to get the gumption to act in the national security interests of Americans, says Ann Corcoran, who follows the migration of Third Worlders into the West for Refugee Resettlement Watch.

“Just think about this,” says Corcoran. “We haven’t enough diversity in America, according to Congress, which has never been able to kill the program, so every year we bring in 50,000 more including from countries that hate us.”

Saipov was clearly one of those haters. He attended the Omar Mosque in Jersey City, survived being shot in the hip by police and bragged about his killing spree from his hospital bed.

Former FBI counter-terrorism specialist John Guandolo says the nation’s more than 3,100 mosques serve as “incubators” for jihad, and there is no such thing as a “lone wolf.” At least 80 percent of these mosques are staffed by foreign-born imams, many of them more radical and committed to the spread of Islamic law than those who stay in the Middle East.

“I am not sure why leaders are confused and ‘shocked’ by another jihad attack on U.S. soil,” he told WND. “These Islamic sites are the incubators for jihadists, just like the Islamic Society of Boston supported the Boston marathon bombers; the Islamic Center of Nashville and the local Muslim Student Association supported the Little Rock, Arkansas, jihadi; the Dar al-Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, and the Islamic Center of Southern California supported 9/11 hijackers and Fort Hood jihadist Maj. Nidal Hassan; the Islamic Society of Chattanooga supported the jihadist who killed five of our men in uniform; and on and on it goes.”

These mosques need to be raided, shut down, their leaders arrested and their assets seized, Guandolo said.

“Leaders like national security adviser HR. McMaster, New York Mayor De Blasio and others like them should be indicted for criminal negligence,” he added. “They have a professional duty to know these easily identifiable threats and do not. Now, once again, Americans are dead because of their unprofessionalism – the legal definition of criminal negligence. We put doctors and lawyers in jail for this, and it is high time our local and federal leaders who are willfully or ignorantly failing in their duties to secure American communities go to jail for it, too.”

President Trump challenged Congress in a tweet Wednesday morning to end the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that hands out visas and ultimately green cards to about 50,000 people every year from such rich areas of “diversity” as Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.

But the truth is this program is just one of many that are failing the American people. There are millions more just like Sayfullo Saipov waiting to arrive in America on their “diversity” visas, while others line up for the R-1 religious visa that is popular among foreign imams, work visas, student visas, entrepreneurial visas, refugee visas, etc. All told, there are more than 200,000 Muslim migrants entering the U.S. every year.

‘Blood on their hands’

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a native New Yorker, says the left has “blood on its hands” for inviting in migrants from such dangerous areas of the world for no other reason than to claim they are expanding the “diversity” of a country that is already the most diverse in the world.

What was it about a 21-year-old Muslim man from Uzbekistan, whose name means “Sword of Allah” in Arabic, that made him appear to leftists as a valuable asset to American society?

Greenfield says its to build the Democratic Party voting machine. And he has no time for the platitudes coming out of the mouths of Mayor De Blasio or Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The truth is, they invite these killers to live among hard-working Americans, he said.

“The reality is, the left has blood on its hands. They earned this. They should be proud of this,” Greenfield says. “The fact that Muslim terrorists are able to continue doing this, and they fight against any attempt to stop it, the Muslim travel ban is but one example of this.”

Watch Daniel Greenfield of the Glazov Gang give a scathing commentary on the left’s culpability in the ‘Halloween jihad’ that left eight dead and 11 wounded in New York Tuesday:

But to be even more real, it’s not just the left that loves to toss candy like the Diversity Visa Lottery to its open-borders donors.

In fact, a bill has been sitting in the Republican-controlled Congress, buried in committee since March, that would eliminate the Diversity Visa Lottery. House leadership under Speaker Paul Ryan have expressed zero interest in advancing the bill, which was introduced by Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla. It has gained only 12 co-sponsors in nine months.

If your congressman’s name is not on the above list, you may want to call and ask him or her why, says William Gheen, president and founder of Americans for Legal Immigration.

“The answer is not to install a new experimental merit-based immigration system nor increased ‘extreme’ vetting,” says Gheen. “America and Americans will never be safer until we get rid of the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, stop all illegal immigration, and greatly reduce legal immigration levels back to more secure and sustainable traditional levels! We must stop immigration terrorism by reducing legal immigration into America by 90 percent or more until we can return illegal immigrants and refugees back to their homelands. Otherwise, immigration vectored terrorism attacks on our citizens and economy will continue and increase with time.”